Chapter 28: Lilith (Part 2)
“Oh.”
Under the commanding tone, the woman named Lilith rose reluctantly and slowly sat on the edge of the bed opposite me, almost half her buttocks hanging in the air. Her hands were nervously placed on her lower abdomen, showing a clear reluctance to come closer to me.
This made me feel somewhat speechless.
Why is she so afraid of me?
Is it because there’s still bloodstain on the mask?
Unable to hold back, I raised my hand and touched my face. My fingertips traced over the cold wooden painted mask, feeling the sticky liquid that had not yet completely dried. After lifting my hand up, I looked at it—it was dark red.
Indeed, it seems to have a lot of blood on it.
There’s no time to wash it now, so let it be for now. Making this woman fear me…
Seems like it’s not necessarily a bad thing. “Cough.”
I lifted my head again to look at her and cleared my throat. “Tell me the whole story briefly and quickly.”
“Okay.”
The woman named Lilith took a deep breath after hearing this.
Then, sitting there, she fidgeted with her fingers, her gaze wandering out the window into the night sky. Her eyes flickered as if she was sorting through her thoughts and emotions. After a moment, she slowly spoke.
“In truth, I don’t know how to say it. Until early last year, everything was fine. Some things still feel so unreal, so absurd…”
The night grew darker amid the hazy city lights.
As the woman continued to speak softly, the entire sequence of events gradually unfolded before me.
Early last year, around late March, the Holy Church declared the end of the heretic purge in Silgaya’s southern territory. The citizens of Alethein celebrated for three whole days, holding grand festivities. The whole city was filled with joyous atmosphere. People praised the Church and those fallen knights, and bards sang new heroic songs. Even when the First Knight Order began to withdraw from the city, the celebratory mood lingered.
Later, it seemed that the holy city issued an order. They said that within the next three years, they would join forces with the Emerald City’s royal palace, northern lords and landowners, wealthy merchants, and newly reorganized currency banks to work together, investing heavily in manpower and resources to rebuild the cities in the south that were severely affected by war and floods. Their aim was to lift these areas out of disaster as quickly as possible, restore prosperity, ensure that people who lost their farmlands would no longer starve, and grant divine blessings to all who had suffered, giving them new hope.
Following this directive, the new leadership under Archbishop Ansheel quickly moved into the city. They listed the first batch of cities that needed assistance and support. These were the cities most affected by the war, with Alethein at the top of the list.
Afterward, as more clergy members and the Second Knight Order arrived, the currency bank’s caravans reached the city in early May, bringing substantial aid. Many people, including refugees who lost their villages and lands during the war, flocked to Alethein during this period.
During this time, the people of the south, especially those living in Alethein, including nobles like Lilith’s mother, felt a renewed fervent hope after the trials of war. People were no longer negative or confused; everyone was full of energy and hope every day.
This prosperous scene did not last long.
Until tax orders and a series of new regulations were continuously issued, eventually, a small group of people began to realize that those so-called ‘servants of hardship and salvation,’ who loudly proclaimed that they would stop people from starving, were actually
Some merchants and great nobles from the northern border came in droves under the pretense of aid. He wondered what their true intentions were for approaching this city.
The ‘mutiny’ of the Third Knight Order also occurred around this time.
“I think the first to notice something was amiss would be the knight commander of the Third Knight Order who was quite prestigious at the time. He survived and later became the new knight commander of Barry’s unit. I’ve met him a few times; he seems like a man with a strong sense of justice,”
Lilith told me that the Third Knight Order received orders at the time. The hundreds of survivors who fought hard on the battlefield would be gradually incorporated into the ranks of the Second Knight Legion after the war.
Although this wasn’t good news for Barry and his comrades, it meant that the fighters who had built deep friendships during the war, those who were still alive, would have to say goodbye soon. The Third Knight Order would cease to exist or become a completely new unit in ten or twenty years.
They no longer had the chance to revive the heroism of the past and carry on the spirit of Commander Williams. At that time, everyone felt disheartened.
However, this was an order from the Holy City, an unavoidable matter. By then, the Third Knight Order indeed struggled to maintain its formation with barely a few hundred men. Although they were saddened, they understood. After a few minor conflicts, they began to make contact and negotiate with the Second Knight Legion over the allocation of integration slots.
“The allocation of slots, Barry told me that those who had good relations were scattered. He was assigned to the Twenty-first Squad of the Second Knight Legion. He met their knight commander, who seemed like an unreliable drunkard that Barry looked down upon. He asked if I could find someone to transfer him to another comrade’s squad.”
“What can I do?”
But things eventually started to look up.
One evening, before his term ended, the knight commander of the Third Knight Order, who had not yet stepped down, returned hurriedly after a small meeting, looking serious. He told a few of them that something was not right.
That night, the knight commander, while on his way to a meeting with the deputy commander of the Second Knight Legion, urgently needed to use the restroom. By chance, he overheard a conversation outside the tent and learned that they did not intend to integrate those hundreds of people into the ranks of the Second Knight Legion. Their true mission here was to secretly sentence the entire Third Knight Order to death under the charge of ‘heresy.’
They planned to first use the method of ‘allocation’ to thoroughly disperse the remaining members of the Third Knight Order, then capture them one by one swiftly, leaving no room for reaction or escape. The ‘confession letter’ used for framing was stolen by the knight commander from the deputy commander’s quarters and shown to Barry and all members of the Third Knight Order.
After that, there were long, bloody nights. “But things weren’t actually like that~”
Lilith later contacted the deputy commander of the Second Knight Legion through her own channels and learned that that night, it was the knight commander with a strong sense of justice from Barry’s unit who had deceived them, deceiving everyone in the Third Knight Order.
The real mission of the Second Knight Legion coming to Arretain City was to root out the ‘remnants of Saint George’—those who continued to support Saint George behind the scenes after his fall from grace and being branded a criminal. Or perhaps their relatives.
Coincidentally, Barry’s knight commander at that time was precisely one of the so-called ‘remnants of Saint George.’
He had been Commander Williams’ personal guard. His family in the impoverished mountainous region of Ethenberel had long been cared for by the Williams family. After Saint George lost his power entirely, his family was secretly taken away and has been spreading rumors around the capital that the Church would rather not hear about in recent months.
